Domestic Secrets: Women and Property in Sweden, 1600-1857

Maria Agren

Abstract

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, women's role in the Swedish economy was renegotiated and reconceptualized. This book chronicles changes in married women's property rights, revealing the story of Swedish women's property as not just a simple narrative of the erosion of legal rights, but a more complex tale of unintended consequences. A public sphere of influence—including the wife's family and the local community—held sway over spousal property rights throughout most of the seventeenth century, the book argues. Around 1700, a campaign to codify spousal property rights as an ar ... More

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, women's role in the Swedish economy was renegotiated and reconceptualized. This book chronicles changes in married women's property rights, revealing the story of Swedish women's property as not just a simple narrative of the erosion of legal rights, but a more complex tale of unintended consequences. A public sphere of influence—including the wife's family and the local community—held sway over spousal property rights throughout most of the seventeenth century, the book argues. Around 1700, a campaign to codify spousal property rights as an arcanum domesticum, or domestic secret, aimed to increase efficiency in legal decision making. New regulatory changes indeed reduced familial interference, but they also made families less likely to give land to women. The advent of the print medium ushered property issues back into the public sphere, this time on a national scale, the book explains. Mass politicization increased sympathy for women, and public debate popularized more progressive ideas about the economic contributions of women to marriage, leading to mid-nineteenth-century legal reforms that were more favorable to women.

End Matter

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